Education

International Council of Jewish Women

The International Council of Jewish Women (ICJW) is a Jewish women's organization established at the beginning of the twentieth century, which evolved with the needs and events over time. As a women’s NGO, ICJW participates in a variety of projects promoting women’s rights and human rights, motivated by its roots in Judaism.

International Ladies Garment Workers Union

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union was founded in 1900 by eleven Jewish men who represented seven local East Coast unions with heavy Jewish immigrant populations. Initially excluded from the union, women began organizing and eventually developed bargaining power after the Uprising of the 20,000 in 1909.

Iraqi Jewish Women

Jews lived in Iraq for thousands of years. Life for Iraqi Jewish women was determined by tradition, custom, and religious law, with a patriarchal system that emphasized child-rearing and household duties. These traditions shifted with the secularizing British Mandate in Iraq, and again with the assimilation the Iraqi Jewish community experienced upon immigration to Israel.

Ida Henrietta Hyde

Ida Henrietta Hyde was a pioneering physiologist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While Hyde was best known for creating a microelectrode that could sample and manipulate individual cells, she was proudest of her work to support other women scientists.

Leah Horowitz

Leah Horowitz was a Ukrainian scholar who wrote extensively about what she thought the role of women should be in Judaism. She emphasized the importance of women’s prayer and drew from the stories of the Hebrew matriarchs to argue that women’s work should be acknowledged and that they have power beyond their marriages.

Holocaust Studies in the United States

Jewish American women have made contributions to the field of Holocaust studies in a variety of areas, including general history, women and gender, children, literary criticism, autobiography and biography, curriculum development, religious studies, sociology, psychoanalytic theory, biomedical ethics, and archive and museum curatorship.

Fanny Binswanger Hoffman

Fanny Binswager Hoffman was an early twentieth-century educator and philanthropist who served as the second president of the National Women’s League, later known as the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism.

Hilde Holger

Hilde Holger’s choreography incorporated her interest in religion, politics, and the natural world. Her works provoked important discussions about the role of dance in the public sphere.

Historians in the United States

American Jewish women have made important contributions to historical scholarship, especially in the arenas of social history of the United States and Europe, women’s history, and Jewish history. Jewish women, sensitive to the situations of minority groups, became pioneers in these fields as they developed from the 1970s on.

Marilyn Hirsh

Marilyn Hirch studied art history used her experience to teach and serve in India. She brought her knowledge as an art historian and Jewish scholar to her thoughtful illustration and writing of children’s books, including the beloved K’tonton series.

Rahel Hirsch

Physiologist, physician, and teacher Rahel Hirsch worked for nearly two decades at the Medical Clinic of the Berlin Charité, eventually as the head of a polyclinic and a professor. Yet Hirsch was never paid at the Charité; she left in 1919 and opened a private practice. Hirsch emigrated to England in 1938, working as a laboratory assistant and librarian, but she struggled with mental illness and died in a psychiatric hospital in 1953.

Dorothea Hirschfeld

Too old, not properly educated, a member of the Social-Democrat Party, and a Jewish woman, Dorothea Hirschfeld nevertheless succeeded in entering the civil service at the age of forty-three. She directed the Berlin Center for Social Work and Care of the Poor in Berlin from 1924 to 1929, and despite being pushed out of work by the Nazis, survived deportation and remained in Germany until her death in 1966.

Gertrude Hirschler

A celebrated translator of deft skill and a woman of great principle, Gertrude Hirschler refused to translate, edit, or publish any book that did not mesh with her ideals or beliefs. Hirschler’s literary contributions are highly regarded in the areas of Jewish history, the Holocaust, religious literature, and Zionism.

Higher Education in Central Europe

Jewish women were disproportionally represented at Central European universities before WWI and during the interwar years. Acculturated Jewish society saw higher education as a way of integrating itself into the educated bourgeoisie. Attending university offered women greater personal independence, even as they faced antisemitism and ridicule.

Higher Education Administration in the United States

The Academy and Judaism share similar values. At both their roots lies a passion for knowledge—the love of learning, the necessity for debate and discussion, an appreciation for the challenge of scholarship. This would suggest no mystery in the number of Jews in universities. However, it is women’s space in these intellectual settings—historically unwelcome by the academy and unsupported by Jewish scholarly institutions—that poses the wonder.

Clara Heyn

Botanist Clara Heyn’s most significant achievement was her work with the plant family Leguminosae, especially the genus Medicago. She was an excellent botanist, teacher, and colleague.

Beth Bowman Hess

Beth Bowman Hess was a feminist sociologist and gerontologist whose leadership, scholarship, teaching, service and mentoring were a model for many women. She brought a humanist and feminist sensibility to gerontology by discussing the difficulties the elderly faced not as problems inherent in older people, but as problems in the social order that should be confronted and changed.

Esther Herlitz

Esther Herlitz was a feminist trailblazer in Israeli politics and diplomacy. She was the first official female Israeli ambassador, among six female Labor Party members who served in the eighth and ninth Knessets, and the first woman to serve on the Committee for Foreign Affairs and Defense. She also helped formulate and ensure the passage of a liberal abortion law in 1977.

Ofira Henig

Ofira Henig is one of Israel's most prolific and influential theater directors. Henig began her career at the Habimah before becoming the artistic director of the Khan Theater in Jerusalem. In 2002 she became the artistic director of drama and dance at the Jerusalem International Festival. In 2004 she was appointed director of The Laboratory, a new experimental theater in Jerusalem.

Lilli Henoch

Lilli Henoch quickly developed a love for sports as a child and joined the Berlin Sports Club (BSC), where she was a key player on its handball, hockey, and track teams. She achieved many feats, notably a world record in the 4x100 meter relay race in 1926. She kept competing in Jewish leagues through 1942, when she was deported and murdered.

Clarisse Doris Hellman

C. Doris Hellman was a pioneering science historian and expert on Renaissance-era science best known for her translation of Max Caspar’s monumental biography, Johannes Kepler (1959).

Lina Frank Hecht

Lina Frank Hecht was a prominent figure in the Jewish philanthropic community in late nineteenth-century Boston. Known for the creation of a Jewish Sunday school for new immigrants, Hecht influenced generations of children through her leadership and generosity.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

A leader in the American feminist movement, Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote some of the women’s movement’s most widely read texts, including Toward a Recognition of Androgny (1973) and Reinventing Womanhood (1979). These texts encouraged readers to reconceive the role of women in society and challenge conventional notions of masculinity.

Hebrew Song, 1880-2020

Hebrew song as a whole, including songs of Erez Israel and the State of Israel, is a unique socio-cultural phenomenon that has developed over time. The dawning of Hebrew song can be traced to the period between 1880 and 1903, and it has grown to reflect the diverse aspects of Israeli society since then. The contribution of women to Hebrew songs, in general, has risen steadily over the years.

Hebrew Teachers Colleges in the United States

Jewish education in the United States was always the preserve of women on the “front lines” and in the classroom. In the early days of these programs, men “ran the show,” but beginning in the mid-twenteith century, women began to take on increasing roles as faculty members and administrators. In the early twenty-first century, women ascended to leadership positions in these institutions.